Mani Ratnam Quotes

In the morning, Capra would arrive with twenty-or-so pages in which he'd written down all of his ideas. Most were terrible, then all of a sudden there would be one which was astounding.

The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.

I write everything I do. On the average, it takes you about sixty months from the first molecule of an idea to it being in front of an audience. I'm actually somebody that creates their own stuff.

I have these huge black foam boards on the wall, and tacked to them, I have these white punch cards with my story ideas, scenes and notes.

Having imagination it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that if you were unimaginative would take you only a minute.

I write stuff down. I have a chalkboard in the kitchen where I will scrawl stuff down if I have a faint outline of an idea. And I'll go into my office or whatever. But that goes from format to format.

I don't have a drawer full of ideas. I kind of look around and take notes and wonder what could actually be a whole movie. And each time, I think I'm going to do it more commercial this time; I'm going to get a big budget and make it. But I always come up with some small idea.

I tend to have an endless number of ideas for writing projects. I don't necessarily say that as a good thing. Maybe it's a good thing, but I have ideas for all kinds of projects: contemporary novels, graphic novels, anything that happens to go through my mind.

I start with an idea that is no more than a paragraph long, and expand it slowly into an outline. But I'm always surprised by the directions things take when I actually start writing.

For me, I get a part of an idea here and a little bit of an idea there, and then finally it accumulates into a movie.

Once I'm given an idea for a story I have a million ideas on how it should be illustrated, but I don't have a big shoebox full of unfinished ideas.

To some extent, I draw on what I see around me; in other places, I imagine what I write.

A lot of my ideas for books come from newspaper articles. But I don't like to be actively looking for ideas.

When I have an idea, it goes from vague, cloudy notion to 100,000 words in a heartbeat.

To make the script, you need ideas, and for me a lot of times, a final script is made up of many fragments of ideas that came at different times.

If I don't have a project going, I sit down and begin to write something - a character sketch, a monologue, a description of some sight, or even just a list of ideas.

For me, writing is a part of directing. It's the first stage of directing.

When I'm writing, I'll just say random stuff that doesn't make sense, and then a certain word that I keep saying will stick out, and I'll write from there.

I like having an idea, or hearing an idea, and getting it into a proper script.

Whenever I write a novel, most of the time it starts with barest slip of an idea.

When you're pitching movies, sometimes you know what the idea is, but you fully don't know the dimensions of it.

I'm always thinking about stories and ideas, and I have a few I'd like to actively pursue, but as much as I love them, I love the process of creation, and I want to go on and create things for myself, and create new things.

I think it's important to say typing in the computer is like the last, last phase of my writing process. That's kind of the fun part. Well, it's all somewhat fun, I suppose. But usually what happens is I think about a movie for at least a year - maybe a couple more - and I don't put anything down.

I think I came to film-making through writing. I started to write, and people, teachers, responded to my writing.

I'll usually see a scene in my head, playing like a movie trailer. After I've written that scene, everything takes off from there.